Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.
 |
One of my favorite things about this time of the year is the moon shining directly through the skylight in the kitchen. I know I’ve posted about this before, such as with this photo of the moon ice on the skylight taken in February 2006, but I hadn’t shown the light and shadow cast on the tiled floor.
Leave a Comment |
This morning I found this pair of Craftsman locking pliers in the road as I was leaving my condo. I’ve been wanting some of these but haven’t purchased them, so this is a nice find.
Before that, I found that my house was 58°F (14.4°C) when I woke up this morning. The thermostat was calling for heat, but the furnace wasn’t igniting. This has happened in the past, requiring a quick reset of either the thermostat (Heat -> Off -> Heat) or the furnace (power cycle) to make it work again, but in the past couple of weeks it’s been happening with alarming frequency. I’m afraid that an electrical component of my furnace is starting to go wonky. I may end up just calling Mike’s Heating & Cooling who did a nice job installing a new air conditioner in 2006. While I normally wouldn’t mind fixing such electronics myself, reproducing the issue is difficult I can’t exactly wait for parts when it’s regularly below freezing outside.
Oh, and welcome to my first post from WordPress 2.7. Hopefully it’ll continue working nicely. As long as it goes well I’ll probably be upgrading the rest of the blogs I host sometime this evening.
UPDATE: Some things are a bit weird, and plugins like StatPress Reloaded and AdSense Manager need their management / control portions tweaked so that they show up under the right part of the Dashboard, but they still seem to work.
Leave a Comment |
Here, have some moblog images:
Leave a Comment· I do not like seeing oil slicks like this in a parking lot. This is from the snow plow / salt spreading people.
· Car with YOU SUCK @ PARKING written in paint marker on the side window.
· Engrish on a model helicopter box at Microcenter. (Click to read more.)
· Deatheater standing near the console at IPM.
· It’s December 1st, time to start on the advent calendar my mom gave me.
· DBAN having just finished running on my old D610.
· Bye bye, D610. Time for me to begin using another laptop at work.
· The bathroom at work has a shiny new air freshener installed.
 |
It works, and the only real problem I know of with it is that the joystick feels a bit odd. It either needs some work; maybe a bit of adjustment or replacement. I’ve also got an original copy of the manual, including schematics and whatnot, and that will be included in the sale. If you end up wanting to replace the joystick, I can help you out with selecting one. They are very easy to install, simply bolting inside the control panel and connecting with eight push-on connectors.
Photos of the cab, inside and out, are available on these two pages: 1 · 2
I can’t deliver it, but it’s available for inspection and pickup at my house. If you’re interested, please let me know. I’ve also got it posted here on Craigslist, so hopefully it’ll go quickly.
EDIT: This game is sold.
3 Comments |
Last night at 1am Danielle was reminded that her gas gauge occasionally fails to indicate the amount of fuel remaining in the tank. Whoops. It’s a good thing she had a gas can and was able to make it into a church parking lot in a reasonably decent area.
Here’s another photo which doesn’t show quite what I’d hoped. That is, it was supposed to show the pile of leaves and tumbleweed collected outside of my garage door, but instead it just illustrates the shadow of my bike at night. Ah well, I guess I can’t expect the CCD in it to be that great.
Leave a Comment |
After acquiring a table and chair for Danielle I had positioned it right in the middle of my office, which was quite in the way. Having some time off, wanting to stay around the house due to feeling sick, and having completed today’s main goal I decided to rearrange my office and fit the table in.
I ended up removing everything from the rack, rotating it against the wall, putting the table between it and the CD rack, then completely re-cabling the rack with only the needed items in place. The vertical wooden shelves were moved next to the door where I previously had a theremin. Everything fits great and I’m really happy with this arrangement.
Leave a Comment |
Since I bought this place I’ve had cellular blinds in the bathroom off of my bedroom, but over the years they’ve become dirty and I found that I never opened them, so there was little point in actually having blinds there. With some time off I decided to frost the window instead, eventually settling on using Rust-Oleum Frosted Glass spray paint purchased at Home Depot for $4.39.
I first removed both panes of the windows (they are double hung Wallside Windows-brand and thus easy to remote) and cleaned them up with glass cleaner, 99% isopropyl alcohol, a toothbrush, and some clean rags. I then masked the edges with 3M Scotch-Blue™ Painter’s Tape, then masked everything else off with more tape and newsprint.
Due to the cold weather painting was done in the basement, and I had to be certain to ventilate the house afterwards because the fumes were making me feel a bit funny. Normally I’d paint in the garage, but with the weather hanging around freezing that wasn’t possible.
Painting itself went well with the paint having a 10-15 minute dry time, after which it could be recoated immediately. I did a total of three coats with each applied in left/right, up/down, diagonal crosshatch patterns to try and get as consistent of a coating as possible. Upon application the paint appears wet, but it dries to a nicely hazy, translucent finish.
Twenty minutes or so after the last coat I removed the masking and blew the dust off of the finish. There were some odd white particles of paint left on the surface, but a gentle wipe with a terry cloth rag dislodged them and left a much more consistent surface. With a total cost of around $5 (taking masking costs into account) this seems to have been a nicely effective replacement for the blinds. Total job time was just over two hours, including removing the windows, painting, waiting, and replacing the windows. The paint did what it claimed to do, which is exactly what I was wanting.
Here’s the photos I took while doing this project to document this project and how it came out:
8 Comments· Masked window set up to paint, next to a can of Rust-Oleum Frosted Glass spray paint.
· Two window panes after receiving their first coat of Rust-Oleum Frosted Glass paint.
· Powdery overspray on the garbage bags and basement floor. Yes, I was dumb and painted indoors, but it was the only option due to the weather.
· Detail of the surface of the glass immediately after painting. Note the white powdery pieces.
· Detail of the surface of the glass again with the white powdery pieces.
· After gently wiping the surface of the glass down with a dry terry cloth rag, most of the white particles were removed.
· This portion of the window lock was removed so that painting behind it wasn’t a problem.
· Window lock reinstalled and detail of the texture on the surface of the glass.
· Window from the outside after painting the inside with Rust-Oleum Frosted Glass spray paint. Note the bottle of window cleaner to demonstrate how the light is diffused.
· Window from inside after painting with Rust-Oleum Frosted Glass spray paint showing the location of the glass cleaner bottle demonstrated in the previous image. This should work well.
 |
Here’s a photo of Bob / utabintarbo riding across the S-shaped bridge which is part of The Pines at Stony Creek. He and I met up with the intention of getting some extra riding in before the normal Wednesday at 6:30 PM group ride, but after our first lap (and a naughty daylight backwards run through The Pines) I was so out of it that I had to stop and go home early. I think I’m getting the cold that Danielle had while we were in the UK, as I feel extremely tired, I’m coughing, can’t properly get my breath, and just feeling blah. I hope this doesn’t turn into pneumonia.
Riding was interesting as the leaf and snow covered trails were reasonably slippery, previously muddy areas were rock-hard narrow ruts, wet areas were now slick ice, and previously loose sand was hard as concrete fun. I had a very hard time making it through some normally easy areas, and I’m blaming this on being slightly overdressed for the cold weather and unable to breathe properly. Ah well, hopefully I’ll be better next week.
A couple of trips to Home Depot and Lowes has resulted in my purchase of some spray paint designed for frosting windows, a replacement light bulb for the ceiling fan in my bedroom, and new LED-based nightlights for the bathrooms. Tomorrow I’m hoping to remove the blinds in the bathroom and frost the windows. Hopefully that will go as well, which is how replacing the bulb in the ceiling fan went, making the room light up properly again.
On a very positive note, I had no problems uploading the image above, and I didn’t anticipate any after incorporating the fix mentioned in the bottom of this post about php-cgi hung as sbwait. It turns out that a default setting in lighttpd breaks particularly badly on FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE, but not previous versions. Changing it to a different setting suggested by one of the lighttpd developers has worked around the issue. This is good.
Leave a Comment |
It amazes me how much stuff good stuff people will throw out. Two weeks ago I found a whole set of women’s golf clubs set at the curb for pickup when I was taking my trash out, so I grabbed them. Now that I’ve got a bit of time, I wanted to post here and ask if anyone wants them. If not, they’ll be going up on Craigslist or to the Salvation Army or something. The clubs aren’t particularly new, but they are in good shape. There are some balls and tees in the bag, along with some animal club covers.
I’ve also got a hand cart for golf clubs that is also free, except this is an old, leftover item from when I was much younger and interested in golf.
So, would any of you like these things? Just let me know. The only thing I ask is that it be picked up fairly soon.
Leave a Comment |
Now that I have a new office chair I would like to get rid of my old one. Are any of you interested? I’d like to get $20 for it, but I’d also take some pizza, order of decent Thai food, or whatever else you’d want to trade for it.
UPDATE: Sorry for not updating sooner, but the chair is now spoken for. Thanks for the interest!
Leave a Comment
